As japanese is the only language in the world that still retains the use of multiple writing systems. korean used to use chinese characters called hanja but eventually they went to using nothing but korean. Example:

kentaku_sama wrote:korean used to use chinese characters called hanja but eventually they went to using nothing but korean.

Korean still uses hanja. It just doesn't use them nearly as much as it used to. The North Korean government doesn't use them at all in its publications, but the North Korean public still does, and South Korea still uses hanja as well. Hanja are primarily used to disambiguate homonyms or to abbreviate, though... everything else is generally written in hangul.

I think thai looks good with the mixed script, though mixing scripts is one of the many things that makes the japanese language so attractive. What do you think?

Eh, it doesn't look so good to me...

I'm really not a fan of logographic scripts -- and therefore mixed scripts using logographs -- from a practical standpoint. I prefer to see kanji as more of a thing of beauty than a thing of utility. So, even if Japanese is the only mixed script in the world, I think the world has enough of them. But the one we've got is beautiful, nonetheless.

kentaku_sama wrote:I don't know why they quit using it but I think alot of languages could use the mixed script:For one is thai, which I cannot speak/read/ or write but can edit copy, edit paste from wiki to edit.

Here's thai with some random kanji symbols inserted all over the place just to see if it would look ok:

kentaku_sama wrote:korean used to use chinese characters called hanja but eventually they went to using nothing but korean.

Korean still uses hanja. It just doesn't use them nearly as much as it used to. The North Korean government doesn't use them at all in its publications, but the North Korean public still does, and South Korea still uses hanja as well. Hanja are primarily used to disambiguate homonyms or to abbreviate, though... everything else is generally written in hangul.

They do still use kanji in South Korea, but only very rarely; you'll be hard-pressed to find more than 2 in any given newspaper article. Most Koreans under 30-40 years old - even the more well-educated people - really only know the most basic ones well, even though characters are still taught in schools. I even came across a few people who weren't able to write their own name in kanji, although I think that this is still quite uncommon. An interesting difference in kanji usage between Japanese and Korean is that in Korea they were never used to spell words that were not of Chinese origin, and as such kun-yomi don't exist. Most of them also only have one on-yomi, so technically it should be easier to get the hang of characters in Korean than in Japanese.

yukamina wrote:Korean with hanja mixed in gives me a headache just looking at it @_@ I find Chinese without enough space between the characters difficult too.

Heh, yeah, it's kind of funny... before you learn an Asian language, they all look alike. I seriously didn't know the difference between the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems. Of course Korean's very easy to identify very quickly, because it has all those circles. Then Chinese and Japanese are easy to tell apart even before you read a word of it because... Chinese is so freakin' dense! I dunno why I'd never noticed that Japanese looks sparse by comparison.

I've studied Kazakh and I'm interested in Turkic languages, which many people say bear similarities to Japanese. Some people will even go as far as to put them in a hypothetical branch called Altaic, which would encompass Turkic languages, Mongolian, and possibly Japanese, Korean and the Finno-Ugric languages.

Currently all of the Turkic languages use either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet or the Arabic script. I was thinking that a logographic script would suit Turkic languages because certain morphemes show up all the time and are often pronounced identically (or very similarly). Like -lar, -ler, -dar-, der-, tar-, ter are all forms of the plural in the Kazakh language, and you know which one to use due to vowel harmony. But it would be interesting if you could instantly recognize it as a plural form by having a single character representing all 6 of those forms. It's just an experimental idea I've had in my head, in practice it would probably end up unfeasible, and the Kazakhs and other Turkic peoples would probably reject the idea anyway (it is controversial enough for Turkic languages using the Cyrillic alphabet to switch over to the Latin alphabet).

My head hurts after looking at that mixed mess. Language in itself isn't perfect anyways and especially English. I didn't take the time to read what everyone posted, but it seems you're referring to the usage of Han in other languages. The Japanese writing system is based off Chinese Han and many languages have adapted their own version.